do attend, you take in the merest fragment of what you might, as you will readily see if you will consider how few details you have really noted in the last chair that you have observed.

Addition.

But on the other hand, we add to what we do pick out for attention. Only a meager portion of the characteristics which we attribute to an object is given to us through sense. The remainder we ourselves contribute. You see a round yellow spot with a certain play of light and shade upon it. Immediately you say it is an orange and your mouth begins to water as you contemplate it. But sense has not shown it to you as an orange. To the peculiar play of light and shade upon it you have yourself attached the notion of sphericity, because you have usually found spherical objects give that sort of effect. From many little factors, none of which presented it to you directly, you have inferred first its position and then its size. Its taste, the structure of its interior parts, etc., all come vaguely into your mind and together they constitute the idea which you call orange. It is not the little yellow spot, but the multitude of associated ideas coming over from your past experience, which this little dab of yellow only serves to call up, that enables you to know it as an orange. How much must you really observe before you are ready to call an object a table? Only a distorted parallelogram for its top and a leg or two. The rest of it you supply out of your own mind. A rattling, broken noise falls on your ear and forthwith you say to yourself "A wagon is passing by." Yet all but the merest fragment of the experience of the passing wagon comes from within yourself. An artist makes a few strokes with his pencil, and you, generously filling in the outline from your own imagination, acknowledge it to be a completed human face. You even go further and, from trifling curves in the lines, assign to the sketch a mood or even a permanent character, and permit your soul to be thrilled by the delusion.

Recasting. Nor do we from within merely take away from or add to what is presented. We thoroughly reconstruct it-make it over

FIG. 1.

until it is tinged through and through with our own personality. No matter how unorganized our data may be, we insist upon thrusting upon them some sort of order. To assure yourself of that, look at the ac

companying figures. They are really only lines on a flat surface, but it is extremely difficult to see them as no more than that. You almost irresistibly see them as certain solids, just because you can not help adding, from your own mind, some interpretation that

will give them a meaning.

Indeed you never look out into reality but that you project much of yourself into it. If you attempt to count a nestful of eggs, they immediately group themselves for you into threes, though actually in the nest they are not so grouped. If you look out upon a cornfield, you at once find yourself tracing out lines through it, though it is just as

FIG. 2.

valid to see the field as a mere aggregate of hills. It is a poor drawing that does not convey some meaning, and a

word or sentence must be much distorted before you will misunderstand it. The effort is sufficient to give the suggestion and out of your own mind you supply what should be there. If you get drowsy you may read "petty" or even "poodle" for "pretty," but ten to one you will not utter some mere nonsense word. If you are trying hard to recognize some obscure object, you see it now as this definite thing, again as that definite thing, but never as a mere chaos. It always has for you some meaningful form. The writer's class in Experimental Psychology was confronted with a dozen ink spots made merely at random. These spots had absolutely no symbolical form, yet every member of the class took each one of them to represent some definite object like a dog, an animal's skin, a map of Africa, etc. It is indeed impossible to take the world simply as it is. We must take its parts and group them into such forms as will have meaning, even though we ourselves must put the greater part of that meaning there out of our own minds.

The ex

Plato's figure. It is clear, then, that our mental attitude determines what our world is to be for us. ternal world is not merely thrust upon us from without. The mind itself reaches out for such parts of it as it knows how, or cares, to take. The old philosopher, Plato, tells us that there comes an image from the outer object toward the eye; and that out from the eye there flows sight to meet the object. The union of these two, he says, somehow produces the actual perception of the object. The outer impression alone, according to Plato, is not enough; we must do our part; we must meet the impression halfway. Now, crude as this psychology of the old Greek philosopher sounds, it is essentially true. Before we can perceive any object we must go out mentally toward it and contribute to it much of its experienced content, so that it contains as much of us as of itself. Only to-day psychologists describe this act in less crude terms than Plato did.

Interpreting by preperception. By way of getting at the present-day account of the matter, let us consider what happens when one is hunting for some object. Have you ever noticed that you can find a book on the library shelves much more readily if you know not only its title but also what it looks like its size, the color of its binding, etc.? Then, in looking for the book, you carry a framework of it in your mind, and your attention is arrested only on those volumes which appear to fit into this framework. Without such framework in mind it is extremely difficult to find the book. If you have several books to hunt, it is generally necessary to seek one of them at a time, with the mind set specifically in shape to grasp the one then looked for. It is in the same way that you hunt for a given word or quotation on the printed page. You bring to the page a mental picture of what the matter sought is to be like, and, as soon as you meet the thing which fits into your mental framework, you recognize it immediately. Similarly you can pick out of a chorus the voice of a friend, or out of an orchestra one of its instruments, if you bring to the situation a clear image of how it is to sound, formed from previous acquaintance, and strain actively for that which will fulfill this image.

But even when you are not consciously searching for a definite object essentially the same thing is true. The mind is always actively fishing, never merely passively receiving what is thrust upon it. Suppose you are trying to make out what an object, approaching you at a distance, is. You try first this tentative perception, then that, until the correct one is found. You suppose, say, that the image is of a cow and proceed to see whether, in certain critical respects, it behaves like a cow. If not you give up that attempt and suppose that it is a man. This you try out and, if you find it not verified, you try the supposition that it is a stump, etc., until you find a mental picture that will work. Usually, however, these attempts of the mind to fit its advance

image upon the object are not so obvious. Yet they are always there. Only when the object is easily recognized, you run down incorrect trials so rapidly and hit so quickly upon the one that will fit that you do not notice the nature of the

process. But you never perceive any object except by the mind's running out to meet it and asking whether it is not so and so. What objects are, is not thrust upon you, but your mind always first goes fishing for them with a net that it itself has fabricated, and these external objects must merely wait until they can respond - "Yes, now you've got me."